Sharr National Park, the mountain wall along Kosovo's southern edge

Most people sum up Kosovo through its towns and monasteries, and the south ends up as a line on the map. I think that’s a mistake. The border with North Macedonia is a whole mountain range, the Sharr, and the Kosovan side has been a national park since 1986. If you like the hills, it’s the reason to add a night or two in Prizren.

Kosovo’s first national park

Kosovo’s Environmental Protection Agency (AMMK) is clear on it. In 1986 Sharr became the first national park the Assembly of Kosovo ever declared. It began operating in 1995, stopped between 1999 and 2002 and restarted in May 2002. A directorate based in Prizren runs it, with a forestry team, a biology team and wardens who patrol on the ground.

The founding law gives it 39,000 ha, and the AMMK splits that across four municipalities. Half lies in Prizren, 39% in Shtërpcë, 7% in Suhareka and the remaining 4% in Kaçanik. It’s a 1986 figure and the agency itself says a new law is needed, so I’d treat it as exactly that, the legal starting area.

What’s actually inside the park?

This is where the Sharr stands apart from anything else in Kosovo. The natural values paper the AMMK publishes lists some 2,500 species of plants, with 323 endemics, 112 vegetation communities, 165 wild animal species, over 200 bird species and 147 butterflies. I’d trust a park authority with biologists on the payroll over any listicle.

The landscape shifts with height. Lower down, oak and manna ash. Between 900 and 1,600 m, beech woods. And between 1,500 and 1,900 m, the special bit, forests of two mountain pines the park treats as relics, Bosnian pine and Macedonian pine. Above that come dwarf mountain pine, bilberry, alpine rose and high pasture.

The wildlife list from the directorate includes lynx, brown bear, wolf, chamois, wildcat, capercaillie and golden eagle. I wouldn’t go hunting for sightings, since that’s down to luck, but I would walk quietly and leave the speaker at home.

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Glacial lakes and summits

This is a high range. The park record puts Bistra, at 2,651 m, as its highest summit, and also cites Kopilica (2,528 m) and Luboten (2,499 m), the latter above Kaçanik. Between the peaks sit glacial lakes. The largest in the park is Livadhishte, at 2,173 m, 230 m long, 120 m wide and 7 m deep, in Shtërpcë. Jazhinca is smaller but reaches 11 m. And in the cirque of Katund i Epërm, in Prizren, the Lumbardhi rises between two glacial lakes, the same river that later runs through Prizren’s old town.

For the other lakes, the big reservoirs of Gazivoda and Radoniq included, see my guide to lakes in Kosovo.

Strict reserves, and what they mean for you

There are four strict nature reserves inside the park. Three protect Bosnian pine forest in Prizren (Rrobulli, 30 ha at Prevalla; Oshlak, 20 ha; and Pisha e Madhe, 35 ha), and the fourth, Rusenica, 300 ha in Suhareka, protects lynx habitat. The directorate wants ten more and 4,118 ha under top-level protection.

For a walker, the practical reading is simple. In those areas conservation comes first, not leisure. No official source publishes access rules or waymarked routes with maps, so I’d stick to obvious paths and keep out of the old-growth forest off-trail.

If you are short on time, see the best tours in Sharr National Park and pick one that fits your day.

Where to get in

The park authority marks its own tourism zones. The main ones are Prevalla, in Prizren, for summer and winter, and Brezovica, in Shtërpcë, which the paper describes as the only organised tourist centre running inside the park. It also names Guri i Zi and Ujërat e Gropuar in Prizren, Gradac and Kroni i Madh in Suhareka, and the Dubrava pastures in Kaçanik.

My suggestion is to go in from Prizren over Prevalla and, with a car and time, drop down the far side to Brezovica and Shtërpcë. That way you see both faces of the park in a day.

Before you go up

The FCDO mentions altitude sickness and the dry-season wildfires, April to October, and notes old landmines along the Albanian border and in the mountains where Kosovo, Albania and Montenegro meet, where it says to stay on main roads. None of that is the heart of the Sharr, but Dragash municipality does border Albania. Your GHIC won’t cover you here either, so travel insurance that includes hiking is worth checking before you set off. With the official information available, I’d carry an offline map, stay on clear paths and assume there are no published opening times, fees or huts. To compare it with Bjeshkët e Nemuna, the other national park, see national parks in Kosovo.

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